Daily Archives: 7 April 2016

Australia’s Silent Film Festival: Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary Celebration

Australia’s Silent Film Festival: Shakespeare’s 400th Anniversary Celebration Silent Films With Live Music

Date: 15 April, 2016
Time: 5:30 pm-6:15 pm (drinks and nibbles in Dixson Room)
Venue: Dixson Room, State Library of NSW. The Shakespeare Room will also be open.
Tickets: $30/ $25 Online www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au or call T 0419 267 318
More info: www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au/cms/uploads/2016_programs/state_lib_apr.pdf

Digital restorations of:

The Life and Death of Richard III (1912) 59 minutes USA Director James Keane and starring Frederick Warde Preserved by the American Film Institute

“An astounding rediscovery of the cinema, Richard III is the earliest surviving American feature film, newly discovered and restored to its original brilliance through the American Film Institute…… Produced as a vehicle for Frederick Warde, a legendary stage actor of the 19th Century, Richard III was the most ambitious Shakespearean adaptation to date. The film not only attempts to honour the intricacies of the original play, it flavours the drama with spectacular crowd scenes and rich colour tints. Richard III offers a fresh glimpse at a time when Shakespeare wasn’t strictly the domain of scholars but was a source of popular entertainment, “when Americans didn’t have to be spoon-fed a great dramatist but were united in their passion for one who gave them characters who mirrored their own complex humanity, not to mention sublime poetry, along with requisite doses of sex and violence.” (Frank Rich, the New York Times)

Bromo and Juliet (1926) 24 minutes USA With Charley Chase and Oliver Hardy

“In this short the wonderful comic, Charley Chase, stages a play as a fund raiser but has to keep an eye on his drunken father and deal with a rascal cab driver, Oliver Hardy. What play? The Bard’s greatest tragic romance. Why do this play? Well, he is way out of his depth as a young businessman who plays Romeo as a promise to his sweetheart who wishes to play Juliet. Plenty of chases, drinks, mad cap all round and back to the play at the film’s end!”

Accompanist: Kaine Hayward

Kaine is in demand as a piano accompanist and has worked as for companies including The Australian Ballet, The Paris Opera Ballet, Sydney Dance Company and The Sydney Conservatorium of Music. As a singer, he has performed at both The Sydney Opera House and Hamer Hall, performed lead roles for Opera Australia, toured internationally and maintains a busy concert schedule.

The Shakespeare Room located on the ground floor of the Mitchell wing commemorates the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. Arthur G Benfield’s stained glass window, the Seven Ages of Man, depicts a scene from As You Like It.

Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, histories & tragedies, published according to the true originall copies, also known as The First Folio, was published in 1623. It was produced only eight years after Shakespeare’s death on 23 April 1616. Apart from the bible, this volume is now considered the most influential book ever published in the English language. A facsimile copy of the first folio is displayed in the Shakespeare room.

The Dangerous Women Project – Call for Contributions

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh invites submissions from students and researchers reflecting on the question: ‘what does it mean to be a dangerous woman?’

Responses will be published on the Dangerous Women Project website, linking International Women’s Day 2016 with International Women’s Day 2017. Each daily post should explore, examine or critique the ‘dangerous women’ theme. We invite creative responses, reflections, and research-led posts by or about women of diverse backgrounds and identities. Research-based submissions are curated under a special category accessible at http://dangerouswomenproject.org/tag/research-led. With posts attracting over 2,000 readers per week (and growing), this is a great opportunity for public engagement and to disseminate your work to a wider audience.

Submissions process:
We are open to a variety of formats and media (essay, story, memoir, poetry, comic, info-graphic, video, image with accompanying text, etc), and welcome text contributions of up to 2,000 words. Research-based submissions must be written in a style and tone that is accessible and engaging to a public audience. All authors must submit a short bio of up to 100 words, and, where possible (though not essential), a photo/image to accompany a submission. All submissions will be reviewed for suitability and relevance by the Dangerous Women Project team, including the IASH Director and staff, with guidance from a wider Consultation Group from across The University of Edinburgh. Submissions should be sent to: iash@ed.ac.uk.

Next closing date for submitting contributions: 30 April, 2016.

We aim to respond with an outcome within one month of the close of each submissions period.
More information on the project is available at our website: www.dangerouswomenproject.org.

Ghent University: Postdoctoral Researcher in History (State Formation 1300-1600) – Call For Applications

Medieval/Early Modern History: one postdoc position (1 + 3 years) within the ERC Starting Grant Project “STATE – Lordship and the Rise of the State in Western Europe, 1300-1600” The postdoctoral researcher will participate in an ERC-funded research project that pursues a new interpretation of state formation in Western Europe between 1300 and 1600. This period is considered as the key phase in the genesis of the modern state, as various polities now centralized fiscal and military resources under their command. While there is debate whether this was primarily a top-down process carried out by princes, or a bottom-up process carried out by popular representation, scholars tend to agree that state building was essentially a process of centralization. This assumption must be questioned, as recent studies have raised awkward questions that cannot be answered by the current paradigm. The research hypothesis is that the emerging states of Western Europe could only acquire sufficient support among established elites if they also decentralized much of their legal authority through a process in which princes created or endorsed a growing number of privately owned seigneuries as “states-within-states” for the benefit of elites who in turn contributed to state building.

This project will study the interplay between states and seigneurial elites in five regions – two in the Low Countries, two in France, and one in England – to test whether fiscal and military centralization was facilitated by a progressively confederal organization of government. Together, the case studies cover four key variables that shaped the relations between princes and power elites in different combinations all over Europe. It concerns different trajectories in 1) state formation, 2) urbanization, 3) the socio-economic organization of rural society, and 4) ideological dissent. The comparisons between the case studies are aimed at the development of an analytical framework to chart and to explain path-dependency in Europe.

The postdoctoral researcher, starting 1 September 2016, will explore secular lordship in the French provinces of Normandy and Languedoc. Depending on personal preference, a focus on either the fourteenth or sixteenth century is possible. The heuristic aim is to develop a snapshot survey of seigneuries and their owners of a part of each province, using sources preserved in the Archives nationales/Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, as well as in regional archives (travel expenses are borne by the ERC-project). The interpretative aim is to use these case studies to engage with current theories on state formation and elite formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

You will be based at Ghent University in the Department of History and the Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies and be part of the research team led by prof.dr. Frederik Buylaert (currently Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Ghent University as of September 2016). The team will consist of two postdoctoral fellows and two doctoral students. Close collaboration is expected with dr. Justine Firnhaber-Baker (University of St Andrews), who will co-supervise the French case studies of the project.

Ghent University was founded in 1817 and counts approximately 40,000 students and 9,000 staff. It is consistently listed in the top 100 of the universities of Europe (see http://www.ugent.be/en).

For full details and to apply, please visit: http://www.ugent.be/en/work/vacancies/scientific/postdoc-rsf0n

Applications close on 15 May, 2016.